Use of Beads at Prayers

Beads variously strung together,
according to the kind, order, and number of prayers in certain
forms of devotion, are in common use among Catholics as an
expedient to ensure a right count of the parts occurring in more
or less frequent repetition. Made of materials ranging from common
wood or natural berries to costly metals a precious stones, they
may be blessed, as they are in most cases, with prayer and holy
water, thereby becoming sacramentals. In this character they are
prescribed by the rules of most religious orders, both of men and
women, to be kept for personal use or to be worn as part of the
religious garb. They are now mostly found in the form of the
Dominican Rosary, or Marian Psalter; but Catholics are also
familiar with the Brigittine beads, the Dolour beads, the
Immaculate Conception beads, the Crown of Our Saviour, the Chaplet
of the Five Wounds, the Crosier beads, and others. In all these
devotions, due to individual zeal or fostered by particular
religious bodies, the beads serve one and the same purpose of
distinguishing and numbering the constituent prayers.

Rationalistic criticism generally
ascribes an Oriental origin to prayer beads; but man's natural
tendency to iteration, especially of prayers, and the spirit and
training of the early Christians may still safely be assumed to
have spontaneously suggested fingers, pebbles, knotted cords, and
strings of beads or berries as a means of counting, when it was
desired to say a specific number of prayers. The earliest
historical indications of the use of beads at prayer by Christians
show, in this as in other things, a natural growth and
development. Beads strung together or ranged on chains are an
obvious improvement over the well-known primitive method
instanced, for example, in the life of the Egyptian Abbot Paul (d.
A. D. 341), who used to take three hundred pebbles into his lap as
counters and to drop one as he finished each of the corresponding
number of prayers it was his wont to say daily. In the eighth
century the penitentials, or rule books pertaining to penitents,
prescribed various penances of twenty, fifty, or more, paters. The
strings of beads, with the aid of which such penances were
accurately said, gradually came to be known as paternosters.
Archaeological records mention fragments of prayer beads found in
the tomb of the holy abbess Gertrude of Nivelles (d. 659); also
similar devices discovered in the tombs of St. Norbert and of St.
Rosalia, both of the twelfth century. The Bollandists quote
William of Malmesbury (De Gest. Pont. Angl., IV, 4) as stating
that the Countess Godiva, who founded a religious house at
Coventry in 1040, donated, when she was about to die, a circlet or
string of costly precious stones on which she used to say her
prayers, to be placed on a statue of the Blessed Virgin. In the
course of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, such
paternosters came into extensive use especially in the religious
orders. At certain times corresponding to the canonical hours, lay
brothers and lay sisters were obliged to say a certain number of
Our Fathers as an equivalent of the clerical obligation of the
Divine Office. The military orders, likewise, notably the Knights
of St. John, adopted the paternoster beads as a part of the
equipment of lay members. In the fifteenth century, wearing the
beads at one's girdle was a distinctive sign of membership in a
religious confraternity or third order. If a certain worldliness
in the use of beads as ornaments in those days had to be checked,
as it was by various capitulary ordinances prohibiting monks and
friars, for instance, from having beads of coral, crystal, amber,
etc., and nuns from wearing beads around the neck, evidence is not
wanting that paternosters were also openly carried as a sign of
penance, especially by bands of pilgrims processionally visiting
the shrines, churches, and other holy places at Rome. From their
purpose, too, it is natural that prayer beads were prized as gifts
of friendship. They were especially valued if they had been worn
by a person of known sanctity or if they had touched the relics of
any saint, in which cases they were often piously believed to be
the instruments of miraculous power and healing virtue.

Beads were generally strung either on
a straight thread, or cord, or so as to form a circlet, or loop.
At the present time chained beads have almost entirely taken the
place of the corded ones. To facilitate the counting or to mark
off certain divisions of a devotion, sets of beads, usually
decades, are separated from each other by a larger bead or
sometimes by a medal or metal cross. The number of beads on a
chaplet, or Rosary, depends on the number of prayers making up
each particular form of devotion. A full Rosary consists of one
hundred and fifty Hail Marys, fifteen Our Fathers, and three or
four beads corresponding to introductory versicles and the "Glory
be to the Father", etc. Such a "pair of beads" is
generally worn by religious. Lay people commonly have beads
representing a third part of the Rosary. The Brigittine beads
number seven paters in honour of the sorrows and joys of the
Blessed Virgin, and sixty-three aves to commemorate the years of
her life. Another Crown of Our Lady, in use among the Franciscans,
has seventy-two aves, based on another tradition of the Blessed
Virgin's age. The devotion of the Crown of Our Lord consists of
thirty-three paters in honour of the years of Our Lord on earth
and five aves in honour of His sacred wounds. In the church Latin
of the Middle Ages, many names were applied to prayer beads as:
devotiones, signacula, oracula, precaria, patriloquium, serta,
preculae, numeralia, computum, calculi, and others. An Old
English form, bedes, or bedys, meant primarily
prayers. From the end of the fifteenth century and in the
beginning of the sixteenth, the name paternoster beads fell
into disuse and was replaced by the name ave beads and
Rosary, chaplet, or crown.

The use of beads among pagans is
undoubtedly of greater antiquity than their Christian use; but
there is no evidence to show that the latter is derived from the
former, any more than there is to establish a relation between
Christian devotions and pagan forms of prayer. One sect in India
used a chaplet consisting generally of one hundred and eight beads
made of the wood of the sacred Tulsi shrub, to tell the names of
Vishnu; and another accomplished its invocations of Siva by means
of a string of thirty-two or sixty-four berries of the Rudr=E2ksha
tree. These or other species of seeds or berries were chosen as
the material for these chaplets on account of some traditional
association with the deities, as recorded in sacred legends. Some
of the ascetics had their beads made of the teeth of dead bodies.
Among some sects, especially the votaries of Vishnu, a string of
beads is placed on the neck of children when, at the age of six or
seven, they are about to be initiated and to be instructed in the
use of the sacred formularies. Most Hindus continue to wear the
beads both for ornament and for use at prayers. Among the
Buddhists, whose religion is of Brahminic origin, various
prayer-formulas are said or repeated with the aid of beads made of
wood, berries, coral, amber, or precious metals and stones. A
string of beads cut from the bones of some holy lama is especially
valued. The number of beads is usually one hundred and eight; but
strings of thirty or forty are in use among the poorer classes.
Buddhism in Burma, Tibet, China, and Japan alike employs a number
of more or less complicated forms of devotion, but the frequently
recurring conclusion, a form of salutation, is mostly the same,
and contains the mystic word OM, supposed to have reference
to the Buddhistic trinity. It is not uncommon to find keys and
trinkets attached to a Buddhist's prayer beads, and generally each
string is provided with two little cords of special counters, ten
in number, in the form of beads or metal disks. At the end of one
of these cords is found a miniature thunderbolt; the other
terminates in a tiny bell. With the aid of this device the devotee
can count a hundred repetitions of his beads or 108 x 10 x 10
formulas in all. Among the Japanese, especially elaborate systems
of counting exist. One apparatus is described as capable of
registering 36,736 prayers or repetitions.

The Moslems use a string of
ninety-nine (or one hundred) beads called the subha or
tasbih, on which they recite the "beautiful"
names or attributes of Allah. It is divided into three equal parts
either by a bead or special shape or size, or by a tassel of gold
or silk thread. The use of these Islamic beads appears to have
been established as early as the ninth century independently of
Buddhistic influences. Some critics have thought the Mohammedan
chaplet is kindred to a Jewish form of one hundred blessings. The
beads in general use are said to be often made of the sacred clay
of Mecca or Medina. Among travellers; records of prayer beads is
the famous instance, by Marco Polo, of the King of Malabar, who
wore a fine silk thread strung with one hundred and four large
pearls and rubies, on which he was wont to pray to his idols.
Alexander Von Humboldt is also quoted as finding prayer beads,
called Quipos, among the native Peruvians.